Baron Crecca was no longer intent on caving in the back of Dean’s head. Riveted by the sight of the onrushing wave, he didn’t seem to notice Cawdor closing the distance between them, either.
Ryan could feel his strength and his physical control returning. For the last few feet, his legs drove forward with real power, as if their overdrive had suddenly kicked in. His right hand did his bidding, unsheathing eighteen inches of panga from its scabbard below his knee.
As the one-eyed man reached the foot of the chair, Crecca bolted away from it and the boy, cutting across the square toward the blockhouse entrance, well ahead of the leading edge of the flash flood.
There was no time for Ryan to hack through the four leather straps that held Dean pinioned. Grunting from the effort, he picked up the chair by the arms and started lugging it and Dean away. He’d gone no more than few yards when J.B. caught up to him and grabbed one of the arms. The two of them then ran with the chair and the boy between them.
Mildred and Krysty ran ahead, as did Jak, who had picked up the girl, Leeloo, and was carrying her in his arms. The companions raced to their left, away from the water, beyond the far end of the square, and along the curve at the base of the mountain.
When they were far enough away to be safe, Ryan and J.B. stopped, put down the chair and looked back.
The wall of water had gouged its own deep channel in the dirt, dividing the square and separating its occupants. The rousties who could run had gone the opposite direction and were out of sight. Those still partially paralyzed by the spores managed to move away, but slowly, like their legs were encased in ice—a feeling Ryan and his companions would never forget. The edge of the flood-choked channel eroded away at the chillers’ heels. As the undercut bank gave way beneath them, their bodies twisted and fell, disappearing into the churning blackness. The main thrust of the torrent had swung past the front of the blockhouse, missing it entirely. But it was rampaging full-tilt into and through the hammered-down shanty ville. With falling darkness, it was impossible for Ryan to see clearly, but it looked as if the entire place had already been washed away, scoured off the landscape. He looked up at the sky and saw that the spore fall had stopped; the threat of blizzard was gone. The thunder, if there was any, was drowned out by the roar of the draining lake.
Beside him, Jak and J.B. were busy unstrapping Dean from the chair. Mildred and Krysty were comforting the little girl. Ryan was relieved to see them working as a team again.
“Is everybody all right?” he yelled over the noise of the cataract. He counted heads as they each nodded, and came up one shy.
“Where’s Doc?” he shouted at them. “Did anybody see what happened to Doc?”
BARON CRECCA STOOD transfixed by the sight of two monumental gushers exploding from the hillside. Twin streams of water ten feet in diameter jetted through the air before burying themselves in the earth, sending dirt and spray flying. The sound it made was like some gigantic engine running wild. It took a second or two for the full import of what he was seeing to sink in.
Then a cold finger touched the center of his heart.
The source of the water was the burning pool.
It had to be.
The pool was being emptied.
Without the protective layer of water, without the lungfish who lived in it, the entity at its bottom couldn’t survive. Without entity’s continued existence and assistance, Crecca’s was going to be one of the shortest lived baronies in Deathlands history. He had to stop the drop in water level, before the pool was completely drained.
Crecca left the boy in the chair and sprinted toward the blockhouse. He was almost there when a ripple passing through the earth made him stumble over his own feet and fall. As he scrambled back up, to his right he saw the flash flood rip a fifty-foot-wide trench in the ground.